Brubaker, Rogers. "The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and its Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States". Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol.24, No.4 (2001): 531-548.

Brubaker, Rogers. "The Return of Assimilation? Changing Perspectives on Immigration and its Sequels in France, Germany, and the United States". Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol.24, No.4 (2001): 531-548.

• Since the 1980s and 1990s, both Western Europe and the United States have moved towards an increasingly 'difference-oriented' discussion of identity. Whereas the Americas, and to a much lesser extent Europe, embrace the idea of a 'melting pot' during the post-War period, discourse has shifted to increasingly stress the importance of protecting and celebrating the differences of immigrant communities, indigenous peoples in the Americas, and regional identities in Europe. This view can also be extended to anti-assimilationalist trends in the gay rights movement, feminism, and the Black power movement in the US (532).
• This shift has been underscored by the growing importance of post-structuralist and post-materialist ideas in scholarship, which seek to defy the false universalist principles of the Englightenment -- decried as reflections of the principles of a privileged section of society masquerading as universal -- and replace them with a society in which different identitarian groups have the right to pursue their own particular and different interests (532).
• The author asserts that due to constant attacks on the 'differentialist' movement by both the economy-oriented Marxist left and the right-wing for its divisiveness, pointless and increasingly fraught divisions, and lack of practiciality, the movement appears to be dying by the turn of the 21st Century (532-533).
• Unfortunately this is not the case, after a brief hiatus during the early years of the 21st Century, it came back with a vengence in the 2010s in the form of identity politics and social justice warriors.
• The West appears to be returning to a form of assimilationalism in immigration policy. This policy is not related to the harsh nativism of the Interwar US, or French and German attempts to stamp out minority cultures or languages throughout the 19th Century (533).
• "It does not amount to a return to the bad old days of arrogant assimilationalism. For while the term 'assimilation has returned, the concept has been transformed" (542).
• The system of assimilation growing in the West since the 1980s differs from past incarnations in that it does not demand complete absorbtion, it conceives of citizens as active agents, it focuses on multi-generational rather than individual changes, it does not enforce cultural homogenity nor have the idea of a 'core culture', and it focuses on cultural rather than socio-economic integration (542-543).
• France has a tradition of assimilation, directed against both immigrants and the peasantry by Jacobin Republicans, which demanding cultural and linguistic uniformity. This was temporarily abandoned during the 1970s and 1980s in favour of a 'right of difference' for regional and immigrant languages and cultural practices (535-536).
• This trend suddenly vanished in favour of a return in increasingly assimilationalist policies after 1987 due to the increased influnece of Jean-Marie Le Pen in French politics. His use of this rhetoric of difference to promote a rapidly anti-immigrant and anti-semitic political agenda freightened the French political establishment into abandoning the idea wholesale and returning to a policy of suppressing cultural differences among the population (536-537).
• The West German immigration system has traditionally focused on emphasizing and reinforcing the differences between populations, in particular through educating foreign children in segregated schools with different curriculum. The legal categories of residents in German was also set, with foreigners essentially unable to attain full German citizenship (537-538).
• This system began to change during the 1990s with new citizenship laws that allowed foreigners to attain full citizenship and demolished many of the separate educational, social, and economic institutions designed to separate foreigners from Germans. This demonstrates an increased recognition of commonality between ethnic Germans and other residents of Germany (538).
• Scholarly perspectives on immigration in the United States have undergone a shift from overwhelmingly assimilationist, merging with contemporary eugenic trends of thought, until the 1960s to an increased emphasis on the differences of ethnic and social groups from the 1960s until the 1980s. This shift largely occurred as criticism of the until-then norm of scholarship assuming the core 'essence' of the US to be White, Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon culture (539-540).
• New scholarship emerging from the late 1980s onward has increasingly references the possibility and even desirability of integration and assimilation. It diverges from previous work by denying the existence of a 'core culture' which immigrants should conform with, but instead recognizing a general trend of mixing, intermarriage, common civic values, and patriotic nationalism (540).
• The aspects of assimilation now encouraged in the US are markedly different, no longer demanding cultural assimlation with WASPs nor associating that culture with success in other spheres of life. Positive assimilation is now associated with English-language acquisition, full participation in social and economic life, and an end to ghettos and other forms of racist exclusion (541).